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Maryland's recruiting has improved since the Big Ten announcement; the Terrapins are finally shedding themselves of the weak ACC football stigma. The key question is whether Edsall can take advantage of the better talent -- if not, Maryland at least should have more resources available to finally hire a legit big-time coach.

What's been your impression of the Maryland reax to joining the conference? Only Maryland fan I know is my accountant and he seemed lukewarm at best. Of course as a B1G fan my reaction was lukewarm as well but I've come around to it. It's a demographics thing in the long run and the midwest is losing its talent base slowly but surely. It's good to have a couple schools that are in a region that is gaining population and UM has a huge alumni base in NYC so anything to energize them is positive.

Maryland is joining a really, really good basketball conference I think you guys are gonna be pleasantly surprised -- well, at least about everything except the occasional sludge ball Wisconsin or MSU game facilitated by the "no blood, no foul" style of officiating those teams seem to thrive on.

What's been your impression of the Maryland reax to joining the conference? Only Maryland fan I know is my accountant and he seemed lukewarm at best. Of course as a B1G fan my reaction was lukewarm as well but I've come around to it.

There was a hue and cry at first -- the very concept seemed so out-of-the-box -- but the College Park community (including casual fans) has indeed come around to it, too. It's simply a better fit than the ACC, both academically (Maryland is finally associated with its land-grant state flagship peers, and both it and Rutgers will begin CIC membership this July 1) and athletically (the Big Ten is the wealthiest of conferences, with an "old money" aura the ACC simply doesn't have, and football there means so much more than it does for most ACC members). To be fair, the ACC's recent petty actions against Maryland -- not just the lawsuit, but scheduling (for both men's and women's basketball next year, the three Research Triangle schools of UNC, NCSU and Duke won't visit College Park, but play their only games against the Terrapins on their home courts) -- has made the Big Ten look better and better in the eyes of Terp fans. It's clearly the right move, although the Maryland basketball-first mindset will have to be adjusted to what it was back in the Jim Tatum era, when College Park had a national championship team (1953), an undefeated season (1951, when it beat national champ Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl) and a number of big intersectional wins (including conquests of Michigan State in East Lansing and Red Sanders' then-potent UCLA team at Byrd Stadium).

With six decades of ACC experience under its belt, Maryland will adjust to the Big Ten far easier than Rutgers will. For nearly half those 60 years, Rutgers was an ersatz Ivy League football program, and it didn't really advance much in its two decades of Big East play. And its overall athletic program ranks far below both Maryland's and the Big Ten (the latest Directors' Cup standings put Rutgers in the neighborhood of Big East schools with far more limited resources, such as Marquette, Providence and Villanova). I don't think the folks in New Brunswick and Piscataway realize the magnitude of the challenge ahead, and I doubt most Scarlet Knights teams will be competitive until at least the end of the decade. It's a big step up on the banks of the Raritan.

With six decades of ACC experience under its belt, Maryland will adjust to the Big Ten far easier than Rutgers will. For nearly half those 60 years, Rutgers was an ersatz Ivy League football program, and it didn't really advance much in its two decades of Big East play. And its overall athletic program ranks far below both Maryland's and the Big Ten (the latest Directors' Cup standings put Rutgers in the neighborhood of Big East schools with far more limited resources, such as Marquette, Providence and Villanova). I don't think the folks in New Brunswick and Piscataway realize the magnitude of the challenge ahead, and I doubt most Scarlet Knights teams will be competitive until at least the end of the decade. It's a big step up on the banks of the Raritan.

I don't see how any of this is the least bit relevant. The Big East has been a comparable football conference to the ACC and Rutgers has been a better football team than Maryland for most of the last 8 years. Every other sport, fine, but who cares about those? It's not like Big Ten basketball is a step up from Big East basketball.

Also, to say Rutgers didn't advance much in two decades of Big East play is just ridiculous. Forget about the wins and losses, which speak for themselves, but the talent on the Rutgers roster now is Big Ten caliber talent. The talent on the Rutgers roster in 1993 was CAA talent.